The last time a monster Stanley Cup drought was busted, the New York Rangers hoisted the best trophy in sports and the game seemed ready to explode into a new golden era.

Then, the NHL promptly drove into a ditch, first enforcing a season-damaging lockout and then allowing the Dead Puck Era to slow the world’s fastest game to a crawl for a decade.

Today, the league has another champion from a big market, Original Six city that waited almost five decades to witness another championship team.

Surely the NHL won’t drop kick this chance away.

The dramatic overtime victory by the Chicago Blackhawks in Game 6 of the 2010 Cup final on Wednesday, the franchise’s first since 1961, was an amazing accomplishment for a team that only three years ago, remember, was among the dregs of the league.

But an old man who had lost touch, Bill Wirtz, passed on, and his energetic son Rocky, a man few thought would be his successor, jumped in and within months had the Blackhawks on the road back to hockey relevance.

Of course, Rocky would become a champion in Philadelphia.

Patrick Kane’s momentarily phantom OT winner gave the Cup to the Hawks with a 4-3 triumph over the gutsy Philadelphia Flyers, but more important, it re-established Chicago in a position of prominence it never should have abandoned.

Moreover, it came in a terrific final against another of the league’s marquee teams, the Flyers, in a see-saw battle over six games that looked set to go the distance until the 21-year-old Kane ended it with a goal that almost nobody, for a paralyzing 20 seconds or more, realized had beaten poor Flyer goalie Michael Leighton and stuck in the bottom of the net where no one could see it.

Almost nobody.

“I knew it was in right away,” said a jubilant Kane, who immediately began to celebrate.

Add this thrilling Cup result to the wonderful Vancouver Olympic hockey tournament, an event also won in overtime on Sidney Crosby’s memorable moment, and you have a year in the game that soars above most of those seasons that followed the Ranger win in 1994.

The rebirth of the Blackhawks, it’s clear, has helped the league more than the combined troubles in Arizona, Nashville and Florida could possibly hurt it. Plus, the Olympics and the Cup final proved the game is as good these days as it has been in years, riding a new crew of brilliant young players.

The Hawks are surely a poster team right now, an offensive squad that scored 25 goals in the six-game Cup final fueled by terrific young players like Kane, Conn Smythe winner Jonathan Toews and defenceman Duncan Keith.

Antti Niemi was just good enough in net — just — to get the Hawks to the Cup, and the champs battled back from painful losses in Games 3 and 4 and then the heartbreak of having the Flyers tie Game 6 with less than four minutes to play.

The series turned on the decision by Hawks coach Joel Quenneville to break up his top line of Toews, Kane and Dustin Byfuglien before Game 5. That spread out the Chicago attack, allowed the Hawks to blow out the Flyers in the fifth game and then thoroughly outplay them in Game 6.

Kane, who started the season under a dark cloud for an ugly incident involving a cabbie in his hometown of Buffalo, ended up as the hero and a microcosm of the way in which Chicago went from darkness to a new dawn.

With his goal, Scotty Bowman got another Cup ring, his 12th, Marian Hossa got it right after losing the past two Cup finals with two different teams and Bobby Hull, if the Hawks choose to make it happen, will get his name on the Cup again.

More than an hour after Game 6 had ended, many of the Hawks were still on the ice, joyfully squirting about 200 of their hardiest fans with champagne.

A parade past Daley Plaza awaits.

It’s been a magical season for the NHL, from the Olympics to the Cup-clinching goal.

Maybe, just maybe, the Bettman administration won’t throw it all away this time.

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